CAQ ahead as of last week, forecasting model finds
Benjamin Forest has crunched the numbers and says he can make an educated guess about how your riding and the 124 others across Quebec would have voted if the election had been held last week.
And the McGill associate geography professor says he can tell you with some certainty that François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec would have won the election, likely with a minority government.
There would have been a 27 per cent chance of a majority government — and a 73 per cent probability of a minority, Forest told me Thursday.
He has figured all this out thanks to a forecasting model that uses the 2014 election results as well as the last poll results — from the Montreal Gazette/Le Devoir/Léger survey published Aug. 29.
Forest created the model with Eric Guntermann, a post-doctoral political science researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
Polls are not completely accurate and events can affect results in a riding on election day — bad weather, for example, or an 11thhour unusual or unexpected twist on the campaign trail, Forest said.
“We get around that by introducing a certain amount of randomness and then running the election 1,000 times to see what happens in each of those 1,000 elections,” Forest said.
The computer program then spits out the probability that a given party will win specific seats. So, for example, there’s a 56.8 per cent probability that the CAQ will take east-end Montreal’s Bourget riding from the Parti Québécois because in those 1,000 election simulations, the CAQ won 568 times.
The latest projections suggest the CAQ would have won between 57 and 66 ridings, the Liberals 46 to 53, the PQ seven to 15 and Québec solidaire two to five. Sixty-three seats are needed for a majority.
Qc125.com, the work of Philippe J. Fournier, a Cégep de St-Laurent physics teacher, has been publishing such projections for years. Fournier’s numbers — based on 50,000 simulations — vary widely from Forest’s.
For example, Qc125’s crunching of the Gazette-Devoir-Léger poll suggested there was a 72 per cent chance of a CAQ majority.
Forest said he and Guntermann will update their results every time a new poll is published.
Check out their projections at ericguntermann.com/qc18.
DEMANDING RESPECT
People of short stature are speaking out about a bar owner (and now ex-CAQ candidate) who regularly held Nain-Jean-Baptiste events featuring small people (nain is French for dwarf ) on Quebec’s June 24 holiday.
On Thursday, the Association québécoise des personnes de petite taille (Quebec association of small people) deplored the fact that “once again, people with dwarfism are paying the price of a show in which they do not wish to participate.
“Regularly illustrated as jokes in the media, ‘dwarfs’ are nevertheless fellow citizens and voters of Quebec who, like the others, want a respectful political debate.”
On Tuesday, Stéphane Laroche, the CAQ candidate for Saint-Jean, withdrew his candidacy after the Presse Canadienne reported that he owned a bar that admitted minors and paid female staff members less than their male counterparts. It also described the St-Jean-Baptiste events.
There are 3,500 to 5,000 people with dwarfism in Quebec, the small-people association says.
The association called on all political parties “to make serious commitments on political issues that are more challenging to people with dwarfism and their families. For example, improving the accessibility of public places and public transportation (and) adopting a Quebec strategy for rare diseases.”
The release ended: “No play on words intended but can we elevate our political debate to what brings us together in Quebec society?”